• Gallup has asked American's to identify their most important problem dating back to the 1950s.
• We will take a look at how Americans have responded, from 1960 to today.
• Data for this project come from the politicaldata package by G. Elliot Morris (see his blog, The Crosstab, for more information)

We prepare the data by selecting responses from 1960 to today, and finding the rank of each response in a given year:

library(politicaldata)

pol_data <- cap_get_mip(min_year = 1960)
pol_data %>% group_by(year) %>% 
  mutate(rank = order(order(percent, decreasing = TRUE)),
         title_text = gsub("^General ", "", title_text)) %>%
  select(percent, year, title_text, rank) ->
  cleaned_data

• Americans frequently view domestic macroeconomic issues as their most important problem, but this changes in times of crisis.
• See the Comparative Agendas Project for more information about this data and more datasets like it.